A brand new version of Revenge of the Titans is out! v1.80.14 - if any of you could test the Linux and Mac versions out a bit more thoroughly I would be very grateful.

This version's got completely new mouse handling (which might work with tablets too!), and uses the very latest LWJGL, so it should work more reliably. Also it's got a special secret mode which will activate itself in a few days' time...

Did I ever mentioned that I love this game? Not just from the gameplay (I kinda suck to be honest) but the beauty lies in the details as I like to say xD Really polished games, I hope I can get close to this kind of game with my own someday! Also the Source proved to quiet helpful in my darkest hours (Still can't warp my head around OpenAL stuff but I will get to that, really nice idea to have your own format with a set loop point. My Idea was to do some channel music like Zelda but weeee~ no time to learn cool new stuff :/)

Got strange issue with sound. Samples are repeating very fast many times instead of one time as it obviously should be. I've got not very 'standard' soundcard onboard - EMU1212, but can't remember I experienced any problems with other Win games/apps (but, probably, I didn't run Java games before).

I think it is problem with library you're using. Exactly same issue with 'Square II' featured here, but 'Age of Conquest III' plays sounds and music without any problems.

Upgrading drivers didnt help (although I more than sure that there is no normal driver updates for my soundcard, rather 'cosmetic', it was like 2011 July drivers on website, and during installation I saw actually 2008 year version).

But anyway I tried this game on virtual machine and yes, it rocks! Liked it! Smooth graphics and very special atmosphere.

Did you know, that there is a "revengeofthetitans" aur-package on Archlinux?But it doesn't work for me yaourt is not able to find the downloaded tar.gz in the tmp path. May be due to my little partition, having 1.3 GB space left...

I was very impressed by the use of this site/forum for your alpha and beta testing, the great feedback everyone provided, and your persistence to deliver a great game. Some of the posts had me believing that the effort wasn't worth the money made -until the indie bundle.

I think you and your team did a great job with the game! I bought it when it went to Steam. As a non-released indie developer, I'd love to hear about your lessons learned, what ways worked in marketing your game, handling alpha and beta feedback, managing support, integrating and using Steam (DRM, etc), how do sales look as an indie game (expectations vs reality vs steam sales, etc), what tools you used, what you would do differently...

I know you are extremely busy. However, if you write something long enough, you could publish to Amazon and sell it for a few dollars to make the effort a little more worthwhile.

Otherwise, maybe you can start with just answering a few questions for your avid followers and developers:

1. what were your sales numbers on Steam (if you don't mind me asking)? Did it go up a lot when Steam advertised it on the front page? Or bundled it with other indie games? or ran a sale on the price? or the winter awards/tickets for playing games and winning a steam achievement?2. how long does an indie game sell? (i.e. 3 months then sales drop way off, etc)3. what avenues for marketing were the best options?4. was the integration with Steam easy/hard? do they provide enough info or did you have to discover? (I read your blog post regarding the activation codes and the birthday giveaway)5. what tools did you use? (development, art, exe for java, libraries)6. how does the auto-updater in steam work? (i.e. did you have to add custom code, etc)7. the indie bundle was a huge success... how did you guys become a part of that?8. any other comments / suggestions for other developers?

Cas, I didn't see your "Ask Anything" post until after I posted this. http://www.java-gaming.org/topics/go-on-ask-me-anything/23960/view.html Many of the questions I asked are answered there... so you don't need to repeat yourself if you don't want to. A full postmortem would still be awesome!

I'll post my findings from your other forum...1. As of Jan 2012: Steam sold 335,445 units (~$500k). That included your 2 games on Steam (RotT and TA), right? How did just RotT do? But I still have questions on #1 that I couldn't find.

4. Sounds like it was easy for you. Steampuppy API was given to Steam for others to use? "Java is really, really easy to use with Steam. Just plonk lib and bin dirs in your depots and that's all there is to it. I'm working on a Steam SDK binding at the moment, but I'm only going so far as to implement the bits I need (which will be achievements and the Steam Cloud)."5. Eclipse, LWJGL (a library you started!), JarBundler and Jigsaw (avoid moleboxed), DRM (http://www.puppygames.net/blog/?p=574), 3DSMax and Photoshop (Chaz used and created scripting to trim/pack, used XML for animation), JOrbis for playing OGG sound; NSIS for Windows installers. Launching on the MAC: "As a .app like we do. Just grab one of ours, replace the jars and edit the plist and so on. I can't remember who originally gave me a bit of Ant script that does this for us but it's pretty trivial."

7. Sounded like 'by accident'

BTW, you also had a link to some source code -- but the link was no longer valid.

Based on me reading your posts... I'd say if you can get on Steam with a good game, you have a chance to make some money. The chance to get on Steam sounded like a "if they like your game, they will sell it" -- probably most important to make sure your game installs easy, works, no crashes, etc.

I was very impressed by the use of this site/forum for your alpha and beta testing, the great feedback everyone provided, and your persistence to deliver a great game. Some of the posts had me believing that the effort wasn't worth the money made -until the indie bundle.

I think you and your team did a great job with the game! I bought it when it went to Steam. As a non-released indie developer, I'd love to hear about your lessons learned, what ways worked in marketing your game, handling alpha and beta feedback, managing support, integrating and using Steam (DRM, etc), how do sales look as an indie game (expectations vs reality vs steam sales, etc), what tools you used, what you would do differently...

I know you are extremely busy. However, if you write something long enough, you could publish to Amazon and sell it for a few dollars to make the effort a little more worthwhile.

Otherwise, maybe you can start with just answering a few questions for your avid followers and developers:

1. what were your sales numbers on Steam (if you don't mind me asking)? Did it go up a lot when Steam advertised it on the front page? Or bundled it with other indie games? or ran a sale on the price? or the winter awards/tickets for playing games and winning a steam achievement?2. how long does an indie game sell? (i.e. 3 months then sales drop way off, etc)3. what avenues for marketing were the best options?4. was the integration with Steam easy/hard? do they provide enough info or did you have to discover? (I read your blog post regarding the activation codes and the birthday giveaway)5. what tools did you use? (development, art, exe for java, libraries)6. how does the auto-updater in steam work? (i.e. did you have to add custom code, etc)7. the indie bundle was a huge success... how did you guys become a part of that?8. any other comments / suggestions for other developers?

Thank you in advance!!!-Charles

Well, seeing as I'm here... yes, one of these days I'll write up a postmortem. But a few unanswered questions of yours could have some answers -

1. Revenues now look like about $705k grossed as of July 2012. 121,457 units sold through Steam alone, 268,111 more keys given out through Humble Bundles and freebie promotions etc (total 389,568 units - so we've shifted another 55k units in 6 months)2. It's still selling nicely though in general terms not enough to live on on a day-to-day basis; but occasional sales give big spikes which keep our daily average up at the level we need it to be. Only just, mind. If we were quicker at making games we'd probably be a lot better off but Chaz and I are very very very slow.3. In order of what things made the most money vs. time spent : 1. Being launched on Steam 2. Being in the Humble Indie Bundle #2. 3. Being in a Steam 24-hour Daily Deal 4. Being in one of the various Steam bundles. Everything else is so small as to be intangible but it's hard to say whether anything else would be as effective without it. FWIW we only spend $10 a day on advertising and we barely make that back now in direct sales from puppygames.net.4. SteamPuppy implementations will be made available to all Steam NDA'd developers. The public Java API I can give out at random but it's no use whatsoever unless you're a Steam developer.5. Didn't use JarBundler or Jigsaw btw6. It "Just Works". Mostly always anyway. Seems to be missing CRC checksums which allows corrupted downloads. Grrr. You upload new files to Valve... shortly after everyone gets new files downloaded.7. By being very nice and helpful and polite to everyone we met for ten years. Yes, really! Got a big network of connections in the industry now.8. Not right now But let me just say that Java is pretty trivial to use on Steam and it's made our lives massively easier as we've gotten Mac clients for free and with the forthcoming release of Steam for Linux we'll have that covered at launch too - which is a pretty awesome situation to be in.

You don't even need code. Sketches, ideas, whatever. You just need a hoard of rabid fans to tell Valve they want to see your game. Obviously of course it is far easier if you've got a game to show people that they'll do this. The purpose of Greenlight is to stop the constant flow of games that the tiny (<10 man) team at Valve who dealt with submissions had to wade through every day. I think we're talking about tens of games every day they had to evaluate. They frequently got it wrong because, well, they're just a bunch of people in a room. They had no idea what really was and wasn't going to sell. Now they figure if you can get 10,000 people to ask Valve to greenlight a game then you're in with a chance to make some money. Perfect.

Installation woes, crashes, etc - they're all your own problem. Valve don't have anything to do with it though I imagine after a certain threshold of complaint and whining they'd pull a title.

You don't even need code. Sketches, ideas, whatever. You just need a hoard of rabid fans to tell Valve they want to see your game. Obviously of course it is far easier if you've got a game to show people that they'll do this. The purpose of Greenlight is to stop the constant flow of games that the tiny (<10 man) team at Valve who dealt with submissions had to wade through every day. I think we're talking about tens of games every day they had to evaluate. They frequently got it wrong because, well, they're just a bunch of people in a room. They had no idea what really was and wasn't going to sell. Now they figure if you can get 10,000 people to ask Valve to greenlight a game then you're in with a chance to make some money. Perfect.

Installation woes, crashes, etc - they're all your own problem. Valve don't have anything to do with it though I imagine after a certain threshold of complaint and whining they'd pull a title.

Cas

Thats very good news.So basically you need a certain amount of "thumbs up" and you are in ?

Yes - but remember you are essentially competing for hearts and minds against 1,000 other indie developers as well. I don't know how they're going to choose which greenlit titles to actually publish but I suspect that they'll just pop the top 3 off the list every week.

Yes - but remember you are essentially competing for hearts and minds against 1,000 other indie developers as well. I don't know how they're going to choose which greenlit titles to actually publish but I suspect that they'll just pop the top 3 off the list every week.

Cas

Well clearly we just need to break all the other indie developers' laptops.

Yes - but remember you are essentially competing for hearts and minds against 1,000 other indie developers as well. I don't know how they're going to choose which greenlit titles to actually publish but I suspect that they'll just pop the top 3 off the list every week.

Cas

Well clearly we just need to break all the other indie developers' laptops.

We're programmers! We can easily go evil and turn computers into bombs!

Cas,Thanks again for the replies! You have been most helpful! I guess now that you have a published game on Steam, getting your next game there should be easy (maybe even not having to go through this Greenlight process).

The link you provided on the Greenlight process had something interesting... "We're going to be reaching out to developers as we see their games getting traction regardless of whether they have achieved a specific number of votes or are sitting 1st or 2nd place at any given time. We are most interested in finding the games that people want, not requiring them to always hit a specific number of votes." - so, that's good news.

I've thought about developing for the mobile devices - Unity3d being one of the tools that would make developing on any platform so much easier. However, I'd need to learn that tool and I'm not a 3d guy. Unity 4 looks to be an awesome tool though (and will support Linux on top of everything else it supports). I have years of Java experience (mostly web systems) with some UI and some game development on Java. I've even tried HTML5 game development - it works great for the right games. I guess it is time to start designing / planning a game to go after and determine the best tool for the job. I'm 90% sure though that I'll be targeting Steam.

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